A Florida Circuit Court Judge has ruled that a law banning people from wearing baggy, sagging pants in unconstitutional. Judge Paul Moyle was assigned the unenviable task of trying a case where 17 year old Julius Hart had been thrown in jail for wearing sagging pants that exposed his underwear. The police report noted 4 inches of the teenagers boxer shorts were visible putting him violation of a town law enacted by voters in Rivera Beach, Florida.

Thankfully, justice was upheld by the court in striking down this absolutely ridiculous law. Judge Moyle noted in his remarks from the bench:

We’re not talking about exposure of buttocks. No. We’re talking about someone who has on pants whose underwear are apparently visible to a police officer who then makes an arrest, and the basis is he’s then held overnight.

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The city of Paterson, New Jersey is considering a ban on baggy pants.   The baggy, saggy drawers look is apparently too much for the city council of the North Jersey town who are contemplating fining people for the offense.   Councilman Anthony Davis is spearheading the measure, introducing a bill that would make wearing baggy pants a violation of Paterson’s indecency laws.  

I was forced to wonder how much of this is about race and/or class upon reading this.   Then I discovered that Councilman Davis is in fact African-American which placed this rights infringing measure squarely in the “classism” column.   The baggy-saggy look obviously had its origins in the young African-American community in this country. Often these days the look is banned in an effort to maintain a certain clientele and keep a certain “element” out at certain nightclubs, some of the few places where discrimination, of all sorts, is not only alive and well, but also part of the draw for many club-goers.   But the style has grown and expanded to include multiple races, making it a statement of a subculture that spans across the old boundaries.  

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